Vincent Tilsley revisited his own 1956 adaptation of David Copperfield for
this entry in the BBC's then well-established Sunday teatime Classic Serial
slot. The four surviving episodes demonstrate the economic, sensitive handling
of Tilsley and director Joan Craft.

The title sequence evokes the novel's key ideas of autobiography and memory,
with a dissolve that makes child David almost run into the mind of the adult
David, and the use of the Peggotty houseboat for the opening and closing
credits. There are filmed inserts - location work and studio representations of
London streets - but the production is largely studio-bound. There are some
imaginative solutions to such restrictions, as in a succession of off-screen
voices and close-ups summarising David's exhausting multiple jobs in one
episode.

David is played in adulthood by Ian McKellen, and in childhood by 12-year-old
Christopher Guard, who is excellent in the surviving third episode (in which he
appears in every scene) and its unedited studio footage, which shows his
assurance when even experienced actors required retakes. The strong cast
includes Flora Robson, Bill Fraser, Joss Ackland, and Lila Kaye, whose voluntary
work for underprivileged children made her, according to the Radio Times,
particularly suitable to play Clara Peggotty.

Patrick Troughton's comic cameo as the pawnbroker followed his major roles as
Quilp and Manette respectively in The Old Curiosity Shop (BBC, 1962-63) and A
Tale of Two Cities (BBC, 1965), both also directed by Joan Craft. Indeed, Craft
played a vital part in Dickens' television profile, also making Martin
Chuzzlewit (BBC, 1964), Nicholas Nickleby (1968), Dombey and Son (BBC, 1969) and
a different David Copperfield (BBC, 1974). With a career that also embraced Jane
Austen, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot and others, Craft deserves wider
attention as a director of costume drama and literary adaptation.

Dickens' resurgent reputation led to a move away from the Classic Serial
slot, a move welcomed by Dickens scholars such as Andrew Sanders, for whom such
productions made the author seem "little more than diversion and entertainment,
and best suited to children". All the same, while this adaptation is
occasionally light in the playing (comic music punctuates some of Micawber's
gesticulations), it doesn't avoid the novel's tough incidents, and its length
allows an unusual faithfulness to incident and character (finding room for
Traddles and others omitted from shorter adaptations). It is also notably more
open to Dickens' language than adult-oriented adaptations like Great
Expectations (BBC, 2011).